


When the Party's Over

by A_Boucher



Category: The Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Genre: Hate to Love, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:02:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27534949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Boucher/pseuds/A_Boucher
Summary: Dresden returns home after encountering the Skinwalker, and finds that the injured fugitive taking up his bed -- long time pain-in-the-ass Morgan -- knows a thing or two about the monster himself. When the Skinwalker takes their talk as an invitation and turns up the heat, the two wardens find themselves fighting for each other's lives.
Relationships: Harry Dresden/Donald Morgan, slight Harry Dresden/Anastasia Luccio
Kudos: 7





	1. Harry

**Author's Note:**

> Prompted by listening to a version of Billie Eilish's 'When the Party's Over' (all rights and recognition to Eilish herself). 
> 
> This fic picks up after the beginning of Jim Butcher's 'Turn Coat'. All copyright, characters and Dresden Files lore belongs to Butcher.

I don’t remember disarming my wards on the basement’s door. It felt like I crossed the threshold in a shimmer, entirely untouched by matter, by magic, anything. The violence of the past few hours was mounding up in my chest, and my last tether to sanity drove off after dropping me at my boarding house.

When the door closed and the wards webbed over behind me, I let my eyes get hot and prickly. I needed to skin my knees in the piled rugs and put my face into Mouse’s thick fur. A fire in the hearth wasn’t going to scratch me tonight, not even a beer. I couldn’t manage them. Stars and Stones. After seeing Kirby, Andi… the Skinwalker… I couldn’t feel the hairs I knew were standing on end.

Mouse hadn’t padded over to me, and Mister was nowhere to be seen. The medkit and cooler weighed on my shoulder and I remembered that I was not, in fact, the saddest sack in this place. I wanted a shower, fresh clothes and my bed. But even in the muggy summer, that cold water was brutal. The little luxuries would have to wait. Keeping my duster on, I left my staff by the door, sent a spell round to light the candles and went to the bedroom, setting my face in an attempt at bedside manner.

Morgan had sweated through his fever, and that was the only indication that he wasn’t a corpse on my twin bed. Mouse guarded him warily, throwing me a baleful look with his too-smart eyes as I approached.

Stirring at my footfalls, the wizard’s right hand stuttered to life, looking for his Warden’s sword. He came to with filmy eyes and recognizing me with – even now – a ticking glare, and didn’t talk much as I found the energy to detail the codeine, the IV drip and the painkillers he should take for the rest of time. I couldn’t get the needle in his arm. He took it from me and zipped it up to a vein. He clocked the Skinwalker’s stain over me, and I felt the gorge of experience between us.

On a bad day, I like to think my reading and getting out of the house to solve whatever supernatural hell was going door to door in Chicago means that I’m not walking around like a naked toddler. And now with Molly as my apprentice – with her mercurial, dangerous talent – under my wing, and doing lectures across the states with the Paranet… I might not fit the Warden’s grey cloak, but I don’t doubt myself as a wizard. And then there’s Morgan, pushing seventy years older than me and brittle, and still not old for our kind. There was a fleck of empathy in his iron eyes. Must’ve been the toll of the fever.

“I Saw one once, too,” he managed, not quite sitting up but holding his ground on the bed. I asked how he killed it while busying my hands, and he told me as if it was nothing. Simple, tricking it onto a nuke testing site.

I almost had the chance to admit that I was impressed, but he was moving on, eyes awake. “Harry-”  
I felt a whorled hand clamp over my mouth - so large that it covered my nose and the better part of my throat. There’s a reason the Navajo peoples don’t talk about the Skinwalkers; don’t invoke them. For all the things I’ve seen go bump in the night I’ve kept on walking. _Strutting._ The word rent through my mind and I felt blood popping in my ears. I couldn’t even scream.

Morgan sat up, calling the Warden’s blade from nowhere and levelling it. Even bruised, sutured, hooked up to a drip and packed with gauze he imposed over the room. Knuckles flexed across my jaw, and even with my limbs free, my mind was screeching, tearing under this presence. The reek of the Skinwalker overwhelmed my nose to bleeding. Bile pushed up against my teeth and was held in. The clamp kept me still.

 _Morgan_ the Skinwalker sounded, and I saw panic shining in the warrior’s gritted teeth. _You have Seen me, yes. You thought you’d bested me._

“Release him,” he demanded, his tone flat and eyes bitter. “Or I will.”

One of the bandages was starting to bloom red around his arm, and he knew better than to distract himself attempting to stand. I’d been afraid of this man since my trial, and his malice was beating on every surface of the room. The Skinwalker rippled with glee.

_Oh, you would try. You would lose._ The clutching hand tightened, and I fought to breathe, my legs kicking over the floor. _You would fail._

Morgan didn’t look at me. He kept unflinching eye contact with the immense, maddening presence. How many people had survived that? Mouse was growling, pinned somewhere against a wardrobe out of sight, and the candlelight of the lounge room seemed to be dimming over Morgan’s sword.

 _What will you give me for him?_ the Skinwalker purred. _What payment, knowing that you cannot beat me?_

In the frenzied light, the Skinwalker stretched itself, streaking past me -- still crushing my airways – to perch over Morgan’s feet on the cot. The sword swivelled to follow its face. I could now see the thing through my watering eyes: those reptilian yellow pupils and a maw, almost unhinged, dripping with certainty.

 _Your Warden’s sword?_ The Skinwalker drooled. _Your honour?_

Fighting the vomit and my leaking eyes, I tried to think. If I could call my shield bracelet to life I might be able to push the choking paw loose. Reaching for it, I called on my will and found it hobbled. A flash of psychic lightning cleaved through my head. I felt my limbs hitch about below me. Someone was peeling paint off the ceiling with a scream.

On the verge of passing out I heard the flat tone again. “My life,” Morgan whispered. The mass around me electrified in an instant. I felt the hand tightening over my nose and neck, pressing them steadily inwards- and then nothing. It vanished in a sweeping yellow vision.

I gulped air through my slimy mouth and packed it up through my nose. I was a heap of over-long limbs on the floor. Morgan’s sword clattered down beside me as the older wizard fell back to the bed.

“Your life?!” I sputtered, trying to understand while my brain pounded and blood trickled out of my ears. Looking up, I could see a red stream winding its way out of the Morgan’s ears too. 

The tension stayed in his shoulders, even as the rest of him muscled frame gave way.

“What are you saying? You’ve given your life to that Skinwalker?”  
“Yes.” His jaw was set again as his eyes closed.  
“Well that sounds like the perfect gambling chip. Really smart. That’s going to teach it a lesson.” I got to my knees and almost to my feet.  
“And when it comes back to Chicago, it’ll be that much more powerful for having eaten you, did you think of that?”  
Morgan turned his head away.

“It won’t come back. Skinwalkers honour their word,” he said firmly.  
“Sure… except it didn’t give you its word,” I pointed out.  
I leaned against the wall, wiping my face, delirious with psychic venom that could just as well have been my own. “Did it.”

It wasn't a question, but Morgan’s posture wasn’t either. Even as I could barely keep from swaying, I saw him move methodically to stand. Remembering that raking voice in my head, I put two and two together. Just because I hadn’t heard the conversation didn’t mean it hadn’t been tied up.

_My life._

“Morgan… just stay down, there’s nowhere to go.” He was throwing his legs off the bed with a stiff dignity that radiated pain. When he turned around though, I felt my sticky mouth go dry. There were tears in the notches of his cheeks, still spilling from his eyes. He passed a hand over his face as more kept coming.

At my feet, I could see the lights dancing over his Warden’s blade with an eerie flicker. I reached down to retrieve it and give Morgan some privacy. Did I even know his first name? Donald. Donald Morgan who’d always hated me, crying in my bedroom.

He took the sword from me, sheathing it back in its scabbard without a word.  
“What did it promise you?” I asked, swallowing through the words. He didn’t answer, turning his attention to the badly laundered clothes I’d piled by the bed.

“Donald… what did it promise?”

He kept his silence until the shirt was over his back and buttoned. By then most of his tears had dried. Mine had dried. But his eyes were cast down.

“The Skinwalker will ignore you and everything you touch, including that model under your trap door."  
My Little Chicago. Something he definitely shouldn't know about.

"You can keep getting drawn into fires for every idiot at the door.”  
He exhaled and met my eyes. “I will go with it into its own realm. Hopefully, I can satisfy it with a quick end.” Morgan tried for a smile and it caved quickly.  
“This is an old enemy Dresden. Don’t try to stand in its way.” He looked down at the catheter banking in his sleeve and ripped it out before I could say anything, hooking it carefully back over its stand. I’d never seen a single gentle movement in all the years I’d known him. Perhaps the prospect of death took the mask off.

Wait a minute. Donald Morgan, setting a life of service aside. That didn’t compute. Not even a little bit. We had the Black Council strongarming its own on the cusp of civil war, and Morgan had come to me on the brink of death not to clear his name but to fix the whole carousel. There wasn’t time for playing the martyr. And of the two of us, he was still the heavyweight. The Council’s executioner. The man who never stood down.

“Why?” Why had he let himself be beaten without a fight? While my head was spinning, he’d gathered everything to go. 

“Does it matter?” he offered coolly, moving his battle-pocked hands to open a Way-  
not in my basement. I lunged forward and shoved his wrist.

“Cut the bull Morgan. You know this doesn’t make sense.”

“Perhaps not. And still, it doesn’t matter.” He looked stoic. Bullied. I didn’t care. Calling up my miniature sun silently, I let him know it.  
“Not another step. I need answers.”

He let his hand fall. A grimace rippled through his grey cloak.

“I… respect you. Your work. You protect people.” The very thing he’d spat on. I felt residual vomit burning my throat.  
“Yeah,” I bit back, “and you’ve always treated me like an asshole, so don’t change your tune now. You came here for my help and what, you throw that away because it’s not council business? Or because it’s on you? You know damn well that I’ve been burned and shot and tortured for that matter right under your nose and now it’s time to let the guilt get you? Don’t pretend this is about respect Morgan. You respect a long list of people ahead of me.”

He had the decency to look away, ashamed. Now that it was said, I felt like a prize idiot.  
Mouse whined in the corner, and I cut the sun spell.

“You’re right,” Donald muttered. “There’s more to it than respect.” And he stepped through the Way I hadn’t seen him finish.


	2. Harry

With Morgan gone, all the candles seemed bright again. Mouse came to nose me down. I couldn’t think where Mister was. Blinking around I realised I could barely see straight. 

I sank into the bloody rug splayed over my bed and let Mouse lick my face in a daze. The whole place echoed with something dangerous. More dangerous than the pact. The Skinwalker could have broken my neck, and for all the bruising starting to form there, it hadn’t. It wanted me to witness. 

And of all things, to witness Donald Morgan breaking. 

Mouse pawed my hand and I saw that it was shaking. I reached out to pat and lose myself in his fur, but he went off to snuffle the air under the seam to Morgan’s Way. With my hands empty, I could hear and smell the whole basement. A lonely place even with two pets. I looked over at the photo of Anastasia and I next to the bed, realising how Morgan must have seen it.  
That thought chased a blush over my cheeks. Anastasia Luccio had been Morgan’s master – the only person I knew he liked. 

He might even have loved her once - she’d thought aloud while we were heaped over each other by the fire. It didn’t bother her; it shouldn’t bother me. We’d been dating casually, and every time she was here, I felt that surge of health that comes from having someone close enough to hold and laugh with. 

She hadn’t told me about Morgan’s arrest or reached out for help in finding him. And then he’d come to my door, half dead and disgraced. Not to his former teacher, the woman he might have loved. He’d put himself in my hands, trusting me to help even as it galled him. Hands now clean of being his accomplice. Chicago would be safe. Anastasia wouldn’t drag me before the Council. They’d keep hunting him until the next disaster, and when the evidence landed squarely on someone else he’d be shrugged off as missing, duty-bound, rotting somewhere that suited everyone. 

Mister was winding around my leg. Circling for attention. 

I had my persecutor’s respect after so many years of trying to win it. Now it’d been bought, cheap and unearned.  
I reached down to scoop Mister and hold him close to my heavy coat. He let out a yowl and kneaded kitty biscuits on my chest. 

Worse than wanting that validation, maybe I was just lonely. But even thinking it, I knew better. Solitude had never riddled me with guilt, and under my conscience was a thought that wouldn’t budge. There was more than a sting to the prospect of Morgan dying. And beneath that, the real hamstring. How I’d wanted him to stay. 


	3. Donald

Savannah. Bari. Krakow. Mexico City.  
I couldn’t bring myself to walk the Skinwalker’s path. Instead I jumped ahead, as if it were just one more Council bloodhound. Falling to my knees back in Edinburgh was easy. Not because of the ripped stitches, the blistering flight through the Nevernever - or the realised weight of giving over to a Skinwalker. 

This could have been my last chance to pray. But I was on my wooden floors under the eye of a morning window in a different grief: the release of my admission. 

I’d all but stated it outright. That all-consuming want. Even here, in this artful city full of pagan scholars and velvet morals I couldn’t shake the fear of it – for a division of heart and mind that, when I was young, would have marked me as an outcast. When it had ebbed with age, I’d made something of my life. I was free to think rationally; able to give compassion. Decades of security that had been blasted down to embers by this reckless fool. By a kid without discipline, killing himself on arcane talent. 

Even when I could accept myself, I never meant to let it rule me.  
And especially when it ruled me, I had never let it show. 

It didn’t matter if the Senior Council found me now and severed my head from under the amoral sack I’d seen so many wear. I couldn’t bring myself to worry over the dent I had just put in the floor. 

Rather than lose myself, I forced one sole under me. Then the next. In my study, I moved to place my life in some order. My Warden’s sword on the desk. My accounts beside my will. I admired the whole of it, formal compared to Harry’s den in Chicago. He’d made good use of candles and books, knowing that wizards fritz electronics. My home had fewer comforts, and now I had to wonder why. I found myself clutching the thick drapes, looking out into the city. 

I’ve told him now, for all the good it’ll do him. Bested the Skinwalker in the only way that mattered. Perhaps it was the only decent act I’d afforded Dresden since vouching for him at his trial. 

_…right under your nose._

If I’d beheaded him then he might have suffered less. Bury that thought. I would have suffered less. All the years of holding him off. Of course I’d been run through to discover how it antagonised him. He could see how I would hurt him – had already – and still demand another way. So young and unseeing, and stunningly brave.  
Such an idiot to leave his guts out for target practice. 

“You are one stubborn bastard.” 

Across the room, the exhausted young wizard dragged his long duster out of the Way and into my flat.  
On instinct, I threw up a line of earth magic between us. He stopped at its edge. There was blood, still, on his earlobes.  
My pulse kick-started with more adrenaline than I could master. 

“I’ve spent over a decade in investigation, and I’ve been watching for you over my shoulder for years. It took me long enough,” he said, warily, “I think I get it now. But,” he paused, crossing over my threshold slowly, taking the brunt of its draining energy, “I want to be sure.” 

“You can be sure when I’m dead.” I heard the words grind out of me. Something flashed across Dresden’s face at them, freezing him the way my threshold should have.

I saw the purpling on his neck bob. He looked afraid. 

Not half afraid as I was. 

“Don’t cross examine me Dresden,” I managed, looking away. “Neither of us will enjoy the answers.” I gripped the back of my desk chair and let myself lean on it. There couldn’t be much time left.  
Harry exhaled and stood his ground. “Now, you see, PIs never like the answers Donald. I’m an adult. Let me decide for myself.” 

As if he needed more consequences and saying it once hadn’t conquered me. 

I clamped down on the chair and felt the wood strain gently. From the window behind me, the light caught the sword on my desk. Dresden should have received a sword of his own by now in recognition of serving as Warden. Luccio couldn’t make them anymore, after she’d been transposed to that younger body. Long before then, in her aging grace, she’d claimed that mine might be her best work. I had suspected that she might try to match it for him, but her integrity was to herself first.  
I’d always admired that in her and found myself chafing all the more at her control around him, even in sharing his bed. Her restraint in denying him a Warden’s blade had been a show of respect. It also betrayed a second truth: she wouldn’t help protect him or help him to protect others. 

Perhaps she’d seen Fidelacchius and Amoracchius in his umbrella stand – two of the three Swords with nails from the cross somehow entrusted to his keeping. I’d only caught glimpses of them when I collapsed across his rugs: the carelessness of their placement. The humility he had in letting them rest. By now he must have realised that she didn’t love him. I looked up into his worried, stubbled face.  
His subtle laugh lines. How could she not? 

My tongue was sore from incessant biting. “I don’t want to lie to you,” I said. 

“Neither of us are good liars,” he shrugged.  
“But I could threaten you.”  
I might have barred a grin at him, but I turned away. There wasn’t time to trick my heartrate. 

In that moment, I felt a heat push through the room, and from the corner of my vision I saw flames climb his whole frame. He strode forward. Steadily. Purposefully. He didn’t even try to hide the inflection of – Merciful God – Soulfire in his inferno. He didn’t blink as I took up the sword to hold him off. He walked right past the edge of the blade, blasting me with the angry radiance of his magic. Past the rock shield I’d subconsciously walled around me. His was an arcane power that made my ears ring. He took the sword from my hands like it was a toy. 

“We don’t have time to lie, Warden,” he said, eyes unwavering.  
The flames extinguished, replaced by that too-easy grin. “There’s a collection date on your ass.” 

I had to choke out a laugh. “I think you know I’ve accepted that. Please… Harry. I’ve made my promise. Let me carry it out.”   
Collecting myself, I looked down to see the Warden’s sword in his grip and smiled. He didn’t carry it with the finesse of a fencer or a knight. He didn’t need it. But his fingers bit around it like a lifeline, or a wish.  
His grip shook. 

His face, angled down to mine, was burning. I could almost touch him where he’d frozen. 

A vortex of power emerged behind him with unmistakeable intent. Whatever chance I’d had was gone. 

Before I could palm for it, the Warden’s steel was returned to my hand, and Harry raised both to his lips. The Skinwalker seemed to manifest in slow motion as I watched him press a kiss into my scarred, violent knuckles and whirl around, facing down a primordial horror that he couldn’t hope to match. 

I’d battled beside him before, watching him fling fire like lances. Seen him pry open buildings with flames that wrecked foundations. I’d saved his arrogant hide from such a blaze once, when he’d been young enough to be an apprentice. He had a pupil of his own now, a lucky warlock. I’d seen him learn patience even when he didn’t listen. I didn’t stop to witness that ferocity lash into the Skinwalker. Grabbing his coat, I opened the Way, and pulled him in with me. 


	4. Donald

The sky over the Eastern Highlands was whipping with stars. Clean air rattled through the fixings of my cloak and set me at ease. We couldn’t outrun the Skinwalker; I just wanted a fraction of time. 

Harry was leaning on my back. We’d hurtled like ragdolls through the Nevernever – probably faster than he’d ever tried. Now, his wiry frame was getting heavy. I moved to stand him straight only to find him unconscious with his eyes blown wide. I almost didn’t catch him, laying him into the heather. 

“Harry,” I barked, shaking him. His irises were flickering with randomly agitated curls of fire. Checking for a pulse, I felt my tongue turn to lead. The glut of bruises could be obscuring a faint heartbeat. I held a finger under his nose. He wasn’t breathing. 

Under that hard night sky – how long had we been running? A full day? – I must have been yelling, but I focused on the compressions. One rib, two ribs. They cracked without response. More compressions, evenly, roughly. The little fire magic I could muster licked over my hands with each one. Weak sparks blackened his shirt and skittered over his duster. He hadn’t even brought his blasting rod. How had he hoped to focus his will? The idiot! What had he lost this time? Not this time. Not this time. 

I could feel the coalescing portal tearing into the bog around us and didn’t stop. 

The open tissue of my leg drummed a ragged beat that seemed to toll the Skinwalker’s approach. I could hear the whir of reality’s fabric around its huge, shimmering form. It lopped through the wind-blasted heath on powerful legs, obscuring the bulk of its body with a veil. Its gait was untiring and cruelly timed to my compressions. 

_Mortal bodies_ it rasped, slowing to tower over me. _Rigid minds._  
_You cannot outrun me, wizard. Your plain is vast, beautiful, empty. I enjoy it. Now this one must outlive you to fulfil our pact. Leave him here.  
He has been broken._

With a sweeping hand, the Skinwalker cast Dresden up into the air. I roared into the earth and cast a basin of soil to catch him, failing to see how he fell. Gobs of bloody saliva rained over my hands and face, drowning me in their stench. They fizzled into acrid smoke on the purity of the sword. 

I should have held him to me once. Or left him in Edinburgh. 

The air around me clouded with viscous breath rank with spoiled flesh and stagnant water. I closed my eyes, knowing where I wanted to go.  
I recalled his expression when the Council acquitted him, wrenching the black hood from his head. Pissed. Terrified. Confused and fighting not to smile. Knowing that life was back on the table, free of the Doom of Damocles. He looked at me knowing I'd lifted that Doom, having heard me grit out his innocence in butchered Latin. He’d met my eye with that unbound energy, and then as now I felt my abdominals tense, my heart breaching its contours.

If that ancient beast kept any part of me, I wanted this to be my brand. Let it gag on strength turning to vapor and Harry Dresden’s promise to haunt each corner of a psyche. 


	5. Harry

If you’ve never seen an ancient spirit you might not guess if it was in pain. The Skinwalker’s basic form, without a veil, would never tip you off, mostly because direct eye contact was enough to induce a haemorrhage. But after hours of exposing myself to it, even before getting back to the basement, I could numb my gaze. Some part of me knew that was what Morgan had been doing. 

And that was just to avoid me.

Now I saw it ripping at itself even as it tried to force its jaws away from Morgan. In the dark, I missed the tell-tale glints of his shield. Still, I could be sure it was working, and cracking the energy rings on my fingers, I called up the juice in their batteries: the kinetic energy from days of busy hands, the crippling surge from Morgan’s thresholds. And the big one. Snatches of seams from every Way we’d torn through over better than a day.

Lunging into the protest of broken ribs I let all of it loose. I didn’t hope to kill the Skinwalker, but I sure as hell wanted to ruin its night out. I thought of Kirby’s neck spotlit by his phone and consumed in an instant. The way Andi’s entire side had ruptured black and blue against the brick wall. I thought of the way Molly had learnt to draw up the beads of her focus bracelet through her anger, and about the lift I’d been given home by a friend. I batted off the thought of Anastasia. She should have caught our trail by now, and she’d stayed apart. 

Targeting the Skinwalker’s roiling, vile form was easy; channelling it past Morgan wasn’t. With my ribs burning I barely kept my balance. I had to. I knew Morgan had been the one breaking them, re-starting me and winding me up again. Two days ago, I’d have given him hell for laying into me and enjoying it. Into that fire I poured just how much I’d hated him, and the relief of being wrong. 

The Skinwalker shrieked in the glow of it, snapping its piercing yellow eyes on me and charging. I didn’t doubt myself as a wizard. As it barrelled forward, I watched it shimmer and fray at the edges. It caught the brunt of my shield charm like an avalanche, pouring over the dome at all angles. At the hem of my duster a whole lot of it dispersed into ichor. 

I didn’t fool myself the way Morgan had. This thing hadn’t been ended, and I’d probably have to reckon with it again. Stars and Stones.  
Scrambling over the mud, I found Morgan bleeding out and sickeningly peaceful. There was nothing in this purple empty night to save him, and I was tapped. I clutched at the hem of the older wizard’s grey cloak, wanting to lay down in the bog and just let it end. Two more dead wardens. The world was always getting meaner. I’d been so used to getting bested, and he had too; but he’d offered me more. 

Then, snaggled in the dirt I found the sword. I stripped it from its scabbard. Praying the last ounces of fire into it, I set it on the worst of his wounds. Then again, and again. After all of them were cauterised, I tugged my mother’s silver pentacle from my neck, planting it in Morgan’s fist and holding it closed. 

“Come on you cranky bastard. It’s such a pretty night, in the mud. You’re dying, maybe I’m dying. You don’t want to miss this.” Nothing.  


“Morgan. Morgan. I’m not calling you Warden again. And… I’ve actually forgotten your first name.” 

“Donald.” His voice was barely a rasp. Such an ugly name to fit his stalwart façade. 

I brought us both upright in a mess of limbs and slack jaws.  
“You asshole!” I laughed, catching his face and a nervy pinch in my diaphragm.  
“Harry,” he said “the Skinwalker?”  
I felt tears wabble on my eyelids. “Gone, today.”

The soldier nodded and lent his forehead into mine. “What you asked me… I’m sorry. So many years I’ve loved you. It hasn’t gotten easier.”  
He pulled free before I could process my response.  
“You saved us both with that kiss of yours. ‘Everything you touch’. You knew what you were doing.”  
I tamped the maelstrom and nodded back. Even exhausted and in shock, I had taken that clause to heart.

“Doesn’t mean you have to live with it. You said yourself, you’re an awful liar. I should know.” 

That pity. There it was again, reversing like a pendulum to dislocate from years of hope. I’d lived the other side of that decade and wasn’t nearly as thick skinned. Morgan straightened his back and retied his hair, and I knew in the tick of my tongue that he’d read me wrong again. 

“You should,” I told him, shaking my head. “But you’re missing the fine print here.” 

And with my last shred of courage, I took his face again and kissed him. His lips were chapped and still until his brain caught up; then I was wrapped in his hungry, aching mouth. My shoulders burned in the force of his grip, steadying me. I wound myself around his heavy neck and the muddy waves of his hair. And oh so gently, I felt my mother’s amulet being strung back behind my nape. When I saw his eyes again, I caught the flickers of a shifting mantle. 

“I’m catching up to you,” I said, finding my breath. “You’ve got a head start on these feelings, okay?” 

With that I laid back in the heather, and he followed my lead. Just eye contact. The odd stroke of a brow.  
I tried his name, and let its bitterness slink off. 

“We’ve got a case we should be gumshoeing,” I thought.  
“Stubborn bastard,” he replied, pulling me close. “There’s time for that later.”


End file.
